


you are so far (the coming home remix)

by zjofierose



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Captivity, Champion Shiro (Voltron), Depression, Galra Empire, Kerberos Mission, Loss, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Shiro (Voltron), Past Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Pining, Pining Shiro (Voltron), Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27222130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: He does the math, calculates the likely window for the sending of the ship’s automatic distress signal to Earth, for the number of hours that it would have taken for the signal to reach the Garrison, for how long he expects they planned for damage control before they released the information.He counts the days from the moment he thinks Keith must’ve found out.First one. Then another.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 61
Collections: Sheith Remix 2020





	you are so far (the coming home remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pumpkinless](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pumpkinless/gifts).
  * Inspired by [not coming home tonight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14702238) by [pumpkinless](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pumpkinless/pseuds/pumpkinless). 



> I owe a million apologies to @pumpkinless for the _exceptional_ lateness of this fic. I'm so sorry, bb, I am the worst. Originally I wanted to do something else, but it wasn't working, and then I decided to do this one instead and got all up in my head about it because I liked the original so much, and also - 2020. 
> 
> In any case, please _please_ read the original fic that this is remixing, because it's so, so good. I can only hope I've come close to doing it justice.
> 
> Many thanks to @sequence_fairy for the beta and the reassurance <3
> 
> title from Ane Brun - [My Star](https://youtu.be/2wlRcfFtnEY)

365

It’ll be a year sometime next week, Shiro thinks. 

He’s not sure, not exactly, but he’s tried to keep track of days as well as he can. As well as he can minus regular indicators of day and night, light and dark. A futile exercise, maybe, but it helps to keep him sane. 

There have been a few times he’s blacked out - from the pain, from head injuries - or when he’s been drugged and had little real idea of how much time he’d lost. He’d judged as best he could by the growth of his stubble and the hollowness of his belly, but those methods are inexact at best. 

Also, a year from what? From the moment the Galra cruiser appeared in the skies over Kerberos? From the moment they were dragged before Zarkon? He does the math, calculates the likely window for the sending of the ship’s automatic distress signal to Earth, for the number of hours that it would have taken for the signal to reach the Garrison, for how long he expects they planned for damage control before they released the information. 

He counts the days from the moment he thinks Keith must’ve found out. 

First one. Then another. 

3

He marks the days on the side of his boot. The first mark he makes when he wakes up in his holding cell in the bowels of whatever this giant purple behemoth is. The metal of the walls is unlike anything he’s ever encountered before, dark and slick and utterly unyielding. Even if he hadn’t been thoroughly disarmed while he was unconscious, he doesn’t think he’d have been able to mark it with any of the tools he owns. And besides, who knows when he’ll get moved. Easier to keep the count on his person. Easier to check it, and remind himself every day. 

It becomes a mantra, a focal point just like they teach in the Garrison: a way to remember who you are, what you’re here for. 

Commander Shirogane Takashi. ID number 08292183-1612. 

Day three of captivity. 

  
  


366

He’s been searching for a way to escape.

It’s not new. He’s been searching for a way to escape since the moment they were captured, first rationally, then frantically, then with the resigned determination of someone who knows the odds of success are ever decreasing. 

A year of his life out here. A year of his life as a captive; a slave. A year of his life, groomed to be a fighter. A year of his life in which he’s been beaten up and operated on and mind controlled and forced and transformed. A year of his life, stolen. 

He refuses to call it lost. 

He gets closer to freedom everyday. He has a plan. He’s learned where the ships are kept, has identified the timing of the guards’ patrols. It helps that he’s the Champion now, with his own meager quarters and a lowered level of surveillance. He’s been good. For months now he’s been  _ so good _ . He cooperates with the Galra witch, he never fights her druids, he methodically and viciously slaughters any creature put into his ring. 

It’s killing him, slowly, as insidious and terminal as the weakness in his muscles which he hasn’t felt in months. He hates that he thinks they cured him, hates that the price of his survival is the bleeding out of others, hates that the exchange is of his soul for his body. 

But soon. Soon, he will leave. Soon he will steal a ship and point himself…away. Soon he will be out amidst the clean and empty darkness between the stars, a million miles away from the bright and roaring mess of the arena. Soon he will calculate the trajectory back to Earth. Back to home.

Back to Keith. 

A year of his life without Keith. 

It doesn’t bear thinking about, but he can’t help but scrape at it anyway. The discipline that keeps him from digging at the myriad of physical injuries on his body does not apply to his mind, and he closes his eyes to pick at the scab until the waves of feeling wash over him. 

Keith. His closest friend. His dearest family. His reason to return. 

A year without Keith, and then just a little more.  _ Soon _ , he thinks, sending his every hope and heart out into the blackness of the infinite space that surrounds him.

_ Soon, Keith. _

  
  


-452

He looks at the photos still on his phone as he lies in his bunk that night, muscles tired and heart warm. He can’t help but grin at the memory of Keith, face all ridiculous caricature of concentration as he leaned backward and forward, phone in hand, “trying” to capture an artistic composition of a fallen leaf. 

Shiro knows he can be more than a little ridiculous; he’s never really cared. He likes to think that he would be as confident in himself regardless of how he looked or how smart he was or how good or poor his ability to interact with others, but he’s self-aware enough to know that might not be the case. Debilitating disease aside, Shiro has been blessed with good looks, physical and mental exceptionality, and a charming, easy manner. 

It lets him get away with a lot. 

Thus, when he decides on a whim to take up artistic photography as his hobby  _ du jour _ , absolutely no one is going to say anything about his total lack of talent for it, or the absurdity of not even bothering to buy a proper camera, or how it looks to see a grown giant of a man squatting down on his heels and hovering his phone to take a picture of a ladybug with a tiny macro lens attachment.

No one, that is, except Keith. 

Keith has mocked him relentlessly for it since day one, and Shiro would be lying if he said getting Keith’s goat wasn’t part of why he’s kept it up. It hilarious to hear Keith tease him, to watch him mimic Shiro with his smaller frame and sharper angles, to see him strut around self-importantly as he takes the piss. 

Shiro’s size and appearance has never once seemed to cow, attract, or bother Keith - he takes Shiro as he does everything - in stride, with a swagger or a sneer depending on context. And yet…there was something, today, Shiro thinks, and ignores the traitorous thump of his heart at the thought. 

There was  _ something _ , though; something about the way that Keith’s body cleaved to his own, the way his face rested against Shiro’s chest like a lodestone, the way that he’d gone suddenly, breathlessly, still when Shiro had pinned his wrists and held him. 

He forces the thoughts down. It doesn’t matter right now;  _ can’t _ matter right now. Not when he’s leaving for deep space all too soon.   
  


367

They catch him before he even makes it down a full corridor. He doesn’t know how; he does know that it doesn’t matter. 

He struggles against the restraints, against the druid voices in his head and the soldier injecting a sedative into his arm. It makes as much difference as it always does, which is to say, none. It’s not until the tall Galra belts him across the face that Shiro even begins to really process that there’s something different going on this time. 

_ Blue lion _ , the Galra says as he releases Shiro, and  _ Earth _ , and Shiro isn’t sure he’s grasping all of the plan here, but he also knows he doesn’t care. Maybe it’s a trap, but maybe it’s the chance he’s been waiting for all this time. 

The tall Galra tells him something about a blade, and another thing about a bomb, and then he’s pointing Shiro at the hallway that leads directly to the escape pods. 

Shiro runs.

He nearly doesn’t make it. A noise, a guard, and then there’s an explosion that saves him and severs the other, a blast that propels his tiny ship into the outside, flinging it free from its bloated and ignorant parent and into the depths of outer space. 

_ Blue lion, _ Shiro thinks nonsensically, his ears still ringing from the blast,  _ Earth _ .

_ Keith _ .

  
  


4

He already misses Keith so much. It hasn’t even been a week yet, and the ripping ache in his heart seems like it grows with every additional billion kilometers that stretches between them. 

It feels like the beginning of the mission again, when he knew he was being silly, could see it in the faces of the Holts, father and son, when he tried to ignore how they shared a look as he retired to his bunk early to record yet another message to send back to Earth. 

But he couldn’t help it then, can’t help it now. Then, it was the first time in years he hadn't seen Keith literally every day, the first time Keith had been more than the lightning-flash of a text away. 

Now - now it’s that maybe he will never see Keith again. That he will die here, alone and cold and unknown at the hands of a cruel alien race, and that Keith will think that Shiro was yet another person who couldn’t keep a promise. Or worse, never intended to.

_ No _ , Shiro thinks, restrapping his boots so they support his sprained ankle and wadding the remains of his spacesuit into a make-shift pillow as he lies down on the metal-grate floor. No. He will find away. He will return. 

He  _ will _ .

  
  


368

“Keith, I’m coming home.”

Shiro grasps the controls of the Galra ship, pulling up unfamiliar schematics with a practiced hand. It’s the adrenaline, he thinks, making him mutter aloud. The sound of his own voice is a novelty, as unexpected as the rusty English on his tongue. 

“Listen, I know I said I’d be back. I know I’ve been gone a long time. I  _ know- _ ” he pauses to focus on navigating past an incoming fleet without arousing suspicion. This pod was scheduled to be discharged around now anyway as part of a routine check, or at least that’s what some of what he thinks are flight plans say. So long as his mysterious helper hasn’t been caught, Shiro should be safe until they notice him missing. “I know I said I wouldn’t leave you alone. And I’m not. I’m coming back, Keith. It just took a little longer than planned, that’s all.” 

He skims what he can of the continual feed of readouts, handling the controls manually because he’s not sure how to set up autopilot. That can be a problem for when he’s farther away from the battle cruiser. 

“I hope you’re keeping well, Keith. I hope you talked to someone. I hope you made another friend, or, hell, I hope you talked to Adam at the very least.” 

“I hope you graduated. I hope you kept your grades up, and blew all my simulation records out of the water.”

“I hope you know how proud I’d be of you.”

A final ping from a border ship and he’s home free, nothing but the star-sprinkled blackness of deep space in front of him. He can feel his hands shaking as he inputs the coordinates for Earth and guns it.

“I hope... I hope you’re still there.”

“I’m coming home, Keith. I’ll be there before you know it.”

“Just a little while longer.”

“Just a little while.”

  
  


-125

He had thought, when he broke up with Adam, that it would make leaving easier. That not having a significant other to leave behind, to have waiting on him, would let him look forward instead of back, would let him board the ship with a skip in his step and a lightness in his heart. He knew that he would miss his grandparents, of course, and assorted friends and classmates and mentors. But there’s always recorded messages, of which they’re allowed to send three a day, and besides - two years isn’t that long, not in the grand scheme of things. 

He hadn’t counted on Keith.

To be fair, at the time he found out he was going to Kerberos, Keith had only been at the Garrison six months - they were buddies, absolutely, and Shiro knew that Keith looked up to him maybe a little too much, but he hadn’t thought...he hadn’t thought. 

It would take another two years of mission prep before lift-off, and somehow in that time Keith had become as much a piece of Shiro as his hands, his lungs, his heart. 

They don’t talk about it. Maybe that’s immature of Shiro. Almost  _ certainly _ that’s immature of Shiro, and a disservice to Keith as well, but he doesn’t think he can say the words, “Keith, I’m going to miss you,” without choking up, and he’s honestly not sure if he’ll be able to stop once he starts. And Keith may deserve better than both of them steadfastly ignoring the approaching date on the calendar, flinging themselves into desperate distraction with as much abandon as they throw their hoverbikes off cliffs, but he also deserves better than to have to cope with the sheer  _ magnitude _ of what Shiro feels for him. 

Shiro keeps it together. He hangs on to his dignity, his poise; he keeps himself calm even as Keith corners him in an empty hallway pre-launch. He watches impassively as Keith’s lip trembles with the suppressed anger that drips from the words he spits into the air between them.

Shiro doesn’t have time for this. 

Shiro’s not sure how he can walk away from this.

“Keith,” Shiro says, and touches Keith’s face like it’s a miracle. “ _ Keith _ ,” he says again, because it’s the only word he knows, it is the beginning and end of his world.

He says something else eventually;  _ please _ , he thinks is in there somewhere, and then he’s in his seat in the shuttle and he’s waving at the video feed and smiling with all his teeth and he can see Keith’s face on the view-screen and then it’s getting smaller and smaller and-

“Here,” Matt says, pointedly not looking as he shoves a tissue at Shiro’s elbow. “It’ll be okay.”   
  


369

The return journey is simultaneously faster than he could ever have imagined and eons long. He stays awake for all of it, running on used-up adrenalin and some stim packs he finds in a locker. It’s the first time since he was captured that he forgets to mark the time, but he’s not sleeping and there is no solar cycle or any attempt at an approximation thereof, so he’s not sure how he’d judge it anyway. And what does it matter, after all? He’ll be back, soon, and then he can stop counting. 

He breaks through Pluto’s orbit and bursts into tears, too overfull of feelings to feel any shame as he sobs onto the con. 

A year ago, they were here. A year ago, the Holts were busy losing their scientific shit over an ice core. A year ago, he’d received a recorded message from Keith, hours old by the time it arrived. 

It would be the last image he would see of Keith’s face. He remembers it perfectly.

It had opened with a sigh, with Keith looking down and to the side. A puff of breath that lifted the shaggy locks of his never-quite-regulation hair off the pale curve of his forehead for just a moment, then dissipated and let them settle back to cover the revealing scrunch of his eyebrows, the vulnerable wrinkle in his brow. 

“It’s hard, Shiro. I don’t like to say it, because,” another sigh, “I know I should just try harder. Do better. Be more  _ patient _ .” 

Shiro’s heart broke open as Keith’s face fell, his eyes lifting to the camera, seeking out Shiro’s gaze across the endless reach of space between them.

“It’s just…it’s just real hard without you, Shiro.”

Keith looked away again, and Shiro stared down at his hands so he didn't have to notice the sheen in Keith’s otherworldly eyes. 

“I’m sorry. I don’t...I don’t have much else to say than that, Shiro. It’s hard. I miss you.”

Keith had bit his lip, eyes staring into the camera again, and the picture of it, of Keith’s sad, beloved face as he clicked the camera off remains burned into Shiro’s retina, too close a match to the teary, determined look Shiro had spied on the ground-facing cameras as the final launch countdown had commenced.

He’s carried that image with him ever since, silent and untouchable and close to his heart. 

Earth orbit is upon him before he knows it, and so are the blipping lights on the map that indicate pursuit. He has neither the time nor the control to land this thing properly, so he opens all the Garrison command channels he can think of and begins broadcasting. 

“Garrison command, this is Pilot Shirogane Takashi. I am pursued by enemy ships, repeat; I have been held captive by the Galra, an alien race, who are now pursuing me and bent on destroying the Earth. Garrison command, come in. This is Pilot Shirogane Takashi. I am pursued by enemy ships and coming in hot.”

_ Keith _ .

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on twitter @zjofierose! comments are love, plz love me <3<3<3


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